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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
Death penalty advocates claim victims' families need it -- and deserve it -- in order to move on. But some of those family members say dealing with death row issues for years only prolongs their pain.
Jan 21, 2003 | When Illinois Gov. George Ryan commuted the sentences of all the state's 167 death row inmates to life in prison earlier this month, the media was flooded with the searing cries of victims' families. "My son is in the ground for 17 years and justice is not done. This is like a mockery," Vern Fueling told the AP.
This sentiment of Feuling and others like him has become the flash point for critics of Ryan and for death penalty supporters. Discussions of possible retrials, or even of the grisly details of the murders committed by some of the men and women now suddenly off death row, took a backseat to another concern: How will the victims families feel?
In USA Today, Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the victims-rights group Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, wrote that "Gov. George Ryan's commutation of the sentences of Illinois' entire death row is a travesty of justice." DuPage (Illinois) County Prosecutor Joe Birkett complained that Ryan "hasn't heard the cries of these families. And there's nothing I can do or anyone can say to undo the pain that he has inflicted on these families." Richard Devine, Cook County state's attorney, called the decision "stunningly disrespectful to the hundreds of families who lost their loved ones to these Death Row murderers."
Those arguments are grounded in a fairly simple premise: Support for the death penalty has as much to do with meting out eye-for-an-eye vengeance on behalf of victims' families as it does with following the law of the land. This support hinges on the idea that the death penalty is necessary for these victims' families -- victims, themselves, by extension -- to "move on" and finish the whole hideous trauma of a murder so they can resume their lives. When John Ashcroft pushed to have Timothy McVeigh's execution televised, he spoke of bringing "closure" to the victims. Mercy for the innocent mandates death for the guilty.
It's a belief the families cling to. "We were looking forward to the death penalty. My younger sister was looking forward to seeing it," says Mary Heidcamp, a 62-year-old Chicago woman whose mother's killer, Oasby Gilliam, had been on death row eight years before Ryan commuted his sentence. "I'm just so disappointed in the whole system, I can hardly sleep at night thinking about it."
Gilliam is the kind of killer whose savagery trumps most well-reasoned arguments against the death penalty. He carjacked 79-year-old Aileen D'Elia, locked her in the trunk, and later beat her to death. If Gilliam's death would comfort Heidcamp, most Americans would support it.
In fact, though, there's little reason to believe it would, at least in the long run. No psychological study has ever concluded that the death penalty brings "closure" to anyone except the person who dies, and there's circumstantial evidence that it can prolong the suffering of grieving families. That's why Bud Welch, an Oklahoma gas station owner who lost his 23-year-old daughter Julie in the Oklahoma City bombing, says, "George Ryan in Illinois did a tremendous service to the victims' family members, though they don't realize it. Now those people will understand that it's over with and they have to move forward."
For victims' families who oppose the death penalty, as well as for some who support it but derived little comfort from the execution of their loved ones' killers, it's a myth that the death penalty heals. They say the pop-psych media formula, that catharsis equals closure, has been mostly created by a society desperate to believe that even the worst wrongs can be righted.
"It's amazing to me to think that anyone could truly believe that sitting and watching another human being be murdered could heal them, but I did," says Oregon anti-death-penalty activist Aba Gayle. For eight years after Douglas Mickey murdered her 19-year-old daughter Catherine in 1980, "I was in such a state of anger and rage, I was lusting for revenge." It's a lust, she says, that was encouraged by the prosecuting attorney. "The district attorneys are very careful to let you know they're there for you. They tell you, 'We're going to convict him, and when he is executed, everything's going to be OK. It's a magic bullet they're offering to all of these victims' families."
Yet families who've actually been through the tortuously long emotional and legal process from one death to another say there are no magic bullets -- and anyone expecting one is just setting himself up for more pain. Of course, some families celebrate the deaths of their loved ones' killers. But few find relief in it, and often the waiting and the appeals and the eerie anticlimax of an execution can only serve to rekindle the pain.
